Top 219 Quotes & Sayings by Ezra Pound - Page 2

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Liberty is not a right but a duty.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

What thou lovest well remains.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

Every great change is simple.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.

Rhythm is form cut into time.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.

Glance is the enemy of vision.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.

Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.